


Early Mornings

by YoYossarian



Series: Outside Looking In [5]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-13 07:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16013444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YoYossarian/pseuds/YoYossarian
Summary: Two early morning conversations between mother and son, three years apart.





	Early Mornings

**Author's Note:**

> Self-edited, so my mistakes are my own. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

_August 2018_

Alma Moir has always been an early riser, can count on one hand the number of times she’d ever felt compelled to snooze an alarm clock. As a young mother, her early bird tendencies meant that she could usually squeeze in hour of quiet time before her boys woke up and the daily chaos kicked into high gear. As a skating coach and empty nester, she slips out of bed at 5 AM, showers, and still has time for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table before heading across the street to open the rink in preparation for 6 AM time slot.

These days, however, her mornings are a little bit less predictable. After a few years of slowly chipping away at the project himself, Scott has finally hired a contractor to oversee the renovation of the fixer upper he bought in 2014. It’s a good sign, to be sure, that he’s handed off the responsibility, that he’s pouring his energy into building a future for himself instead of renovating the house to stay out of the bar.

Now that the renovation is in full swing (the entire place needs to be re-wired and she is grateful that her boys aren’t messing with the electric) he’s back in his childhood bedroom for a while. When he and Tessa are between tours, like today, he helps her open the rink and spends a few hours giving pointers to local junior ice dance teams.

This morning, however, Alma is showered, dressed, and pouring her first cup of coffee before he’s made an appearance in the kitchen. In fact, she hasn’t even heard him shuffling around upstairs, which is unusual because he’s quite punctual when it comes to the ice and very serious about his commitments to the younger skaters. At 5:30, she heads upstairs and taps on his closed bedroom door. There’s no answer, and when she swings the door open, she’s greeted by an empty room and a neatly made, un-slept in twin bed.

And it’s not that she’s worried, he is an adult and this isn’t 2014, but he’d been home when she went to bed last night and he hadn’t mentioned any plans, so it’s mostly just a surprise. She heads back downstairs to sip her coffee and skim the newspaper while she waits.

At 5:36, she hears the front door open and then shut with a soft click, the sound of someone kicking off their shoes and padding down the hallway towards the kitchen.

“Morning, Scotty,” she says when he appears in the kitchen wearing, she notices, yesterday’s clothes.

At thirty, he’s been living away from home for half of his life, but he still jumps at the sound of his mother’s voice, and a guilty look flits briefly across his face before he replaces it with a grin. “Morning, Ma. Save any of that coffee for me?”

“Yep, I’ll fix you up a travel mug. Now hurry your butt up, we need to head over in ten.”

“I’m on it,” he assures her with a mock salute before hustling up the stairs. She doesn’t ask where he spent the night, doesn’t feel the need to pry, though she has a pretty good guess.

True to his word, he’s back downstairs in ten minutes, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes, to accept the oversized travel mug she’d poured for him and sling both of their skate bags over his shoulder.

“How’s the eye feeling?” She asks, glancing up at him as they walk together across the arena parking lot.

“Barely hurts anymore, so now it’s just embarrassing,” he says, taking a cautious sip of the hot coffee. “Charlie’s never gonna let me live this one down.”

His black eye is slowly fading, no longer swollen, but still a few days away from disappearing completely. Charlie, whose beer league softball team Scott had been subbing on when he’d run for a deep fly ball and somehow managed to deflect it into his own face, couldn’t stop cackling as he recounted the story to their parents that night. (“And they call this kid one of the great Canadian athletes!”). Scott, slouched dramatically in a kitchen chair with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his face, hadn’t been in a much of a position to defend himself, so he’d just flipped his brother the bird in response.

“I’m sure it’ll be gone in time for the party this weekend,” Alma reassures him, patting his arm and shoving back memories of black eyes and split lips that didn’t have such innocent explanations as she unlocks the door of the arena. “You may have to make up a better story for the kids this morning, though. Something a little more heroic?”

“You too? As if I’m not already getting enough grief from Charlie?” Scott groan, rolls his eyes dramatically, and flips on the lights.

-

_May 2015_

It’s a discarded pharmacy receipt that gives him away, crumpled, but left sitting on his nightstand in plain view, which makes Alma wonder if he meant for her to find it all along. She wasn’t snooping, just tidying, and there it was, First Response and Clearblue glaring up in clear black lettering, two different brands for good measure. The receipt is dated five days earlier, coinciding with the long weekend Kaitlyn had just spent in Ilderton and Scott’s persistent moodiness. She leaves it untouched on the bedside table, one of the few beacons of adulthood in what otherwise still looks like a young boy’s room.

Alma considers herself an experienced mother. Between her three boys, she’s tackled broken bones and broken hearts, fist fights and tears, poorly hidden hickeys and more than a few speeding tickets. She’s never seen any benefit to helicopter parenting and always tried to walk the line between giving her boys space to make their own mistakes and letting them know that she’ll always be there when they needed to talk.

She means to bring it up to him that night, but he doesn’t come home, at least not before she climbs into bed, reminding herself that even though he’s still living under her roof, he’s an adult and it’s years past when he’d expect to find her waiting up.

As it happens, however, she does catch him slinking in just after 5 AM the next morning, a Thursday, while she’s pouring her first cup of coffee. She can tell by the way he carries himself that he hasn’t slept, but he grins when he sees her (“Hey, Ma”) and pulls her into a side hug, smelling like stale beer and whiskey and the cigarettes he thinks he’s hiding.

“You need a shower,” she says, wrinkling her nose, but he just nods absently as if this is normal and everything’s fine. He’s not drunk, but not entirely sober and they’ve crossed paths like this enough times since Sochi that she knows she has a small window to bring up the receipt before he either passes out, fully clothed, on the couch or on top of his faded Maple Leafs comforter.

“Scott, there’s something I want to ask you about,” she says solemnly, taking his hand and meeting his eyes, a carbon copy of her own, though right now they’re bloodshot and glassy. He quirks an eyebrow, shifts his weight from foot to foot, grin fading as he takes in her posture and tone. He’s always been able to read people, even like this, even after the year he’s had.

“And I want to remind you that I love you, absolutely, no matter what, that I’m not passing judgement. You’re an adult and you can let me know if this is none of my business, but you’ve seemed…off… since last weekend and I want to make sure everything is okay.”

His eyes narrow slightly and she can see the gears turning, albeit more slowly than if he were entirely sober. He nods jerkily, acknowledging her words even as he pulls back his hand and crosses his arms protectively across his chest, even as she can see his jaw start to clench.

“Is Kaitlyn pregnant?”

He winces, looks away, swallows, shakes his head.

“No.”

He’s twenty-six, almost twenty-seven. Young, but not so young that he couldn’t be a great father; he just needs a little direction. And Kaitlyn is lovely, funny, and sweet with a personality that compliments his. They’ve been together for more than a year and maybe it’s not perfect, but when Scott is with her he seems happy, which is all any mother can ask for their child. All of which is to say that the flood of relief she feels at his answer is perhaps unfounded and maybe a little bit unfair.

“And how do you feel about that,” she asks, because he’s been so quiet the past couple days that she hardly knows when he’s home, which isn’t in character and isn’t generally a good sign. He doesn’t answer right away, but also doesn’t walk away, so she waits, watching as he wrings his hands, eyes boring a hole in the kitchen floor as he finds the words.

“Relieved. And like the world’s biggest asshole, but mostly just relieved,” he finally says, voice low. He doesn’t look up to meet her gaze, but pauses, fights to even out his breathing, and she waits for him to continue. He’s always been the most emotional of her boys.

“She’s been talking about looking for a team here, moving to Ontario. For me. Because it’s what I _told her_ I wanted, what I _thought_ I wanted. But when she started bringing it up, I started avoiding the conversation. And then this happened and when she said she might be… I just felt sick. Not nervous sick, like it was unexpected, but deep sick like I might die if it was real.”

He speaks slowly, wringing his hands all along, still looking everywhere except at her. Scott has always been open with her when she asks him questions, even the tough ones. She’s always imagined that it was due to some combination of her being a good listener and the fact that he moved away when he was so young, the years and the distance molding their relationship into something a little bit open and honest by necessity.

“You’re not supposed to feel that way when you love someone, eh? But even though I know that, I’d’ve ask her to marry me, which is fucked up because she deserves better than some asshole who can’t love her like she deserves,” he says, his voice tired and fading, and it’s breaking Alma’s heart. “So I need to break up with her, probably before Tess and I leave for China, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about since last weekend.”

Alma listens, stands up and hugs him tightly, whispers that she loves him, that he’s a wonderful son, a wonderful man, and she will always love him no matter what, and holds him until his shoulders stop shaking, but he hasn’t asked for advice and so she doesn’t offer any. By the time she leaves for the rink fifteen minutes later, his bedroom door is closed.

Scott never brings it up again and the relationship hangs on a couple more months, but Alma doesn’t see Kaitlyn again until February 2018.

-

_October 7, 2018_

“No matter what happens, we’ll be fine. We’ll make it work. It’s you and me, kiddo.”

“God, phrasing, Scott.”

“Sorry, sorry, ignore that.”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m just on edge. There’s no point in putting it off any longer; hand it over.”

A plastic bag rustles and a door shuts.

Alma can hear the entire conversation from the kitchen. It hadn’t occurred to her to knock, Scott knew she was coming over to pick up an extra folding table for Thanksgiving, but given the conversation taking place down the hall, she imagines that he has other things on his mind.

She doesn’t think that they’ve heard her come in, so she makes the executive decision to pretend she’d never stopped by at all. She slips back out the door, which thankfully swings open and shut without a peep, and hurries to her car. Back at home, she texts Scott to say that she got caught up with other errands and asks him to bring the folding table the next day.

The next afternoon, he and Tessa come over a few minutes early to help set up the extra table. They both seem relaxed, smiling and laughing and sharing stories about the first two shows of the tour, and later, when Scott is nursing a beer and Tessa is sipping on a glass of white wine, Alma knows that grandchild number six is officially not en route. And though she’d love nothing more, she also glad because she understands that it’s not time yet, there’s the tour and the MBA Tessa’s planning to pursue at McGill and the teams Scott’s taking on next season at Gadbois. They never have made a formal announcement, privately or publicly, about the state of their relationship, but by this point friends and family simply take their togetherness at face value and Alma will never be anything but happy to wait patiently as they build a life together.


End file.
